Dr. Michelle Monje
speaker
133 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 31 Jul
Dr. Michelle Monje’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
20 years ago, there was really very little understood about the fundamental biology of brain cancers.
And this wasn't for lack of effort in the field.
But the approach to brain cancers was, I think, missing some really important components and also limited by...
just technological abilities to study this really difficult disease and difficult to access disease.
This was especially true about childhood brain cancers.
When I was a medical student, I remember seeing the very first patient that I ever saw with diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma, which we now call diffuse midline glioma of the pons.
This is one of the most common aggressive cancers in pediatric neuro-oncology.
It is the leading cause of cancer-related death in children.
And there was just nothing known about it.
And really, at the time, no way to study it.
And seeing this disease unfold in the first patient that I cared for, watching this beautiful young girl who was, you know, bright light coming into the clinic with just minimal symptoms of crossed eyes and a little bit of weakness on one side, watching her lose all ability to move, to speak, to communicate and ultimately pass within six months, felt like something I just couldn't turn away from.
And so I decided at the time to...
really focus on these diseases and to approach them from the perspective of neurobiology.
They really seem to be cancers that happened in the childhood nervous system at particular points of development at particular ages in specific locations for those ages.
And that really spoke to the idea that somehow these childhood brain cancers were diseases of brain development in childhood gone wrong.
And I thought that perhaps I could approach it from that perspective.
Optimism and maybe a little bit of hubris.
At the time, I was a MD-PhD student at Stanford, and I was studying neural stem and precursor cell biology.
And one of the things that we had to do to study neural stem and precursor cells was to culture them from the brains either of experimental animals or in the early postmortem hours after passing from humans.
So I thought that we could apply that same technique to brain cancers.
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